Thortech Thunderbolt 1000W Modular Power Supply Unit Review
Jake Sedge / 13 years ago
The first thing we see upon opening the unit is the 135mm Globe fan. This thing is whisper quiet and is totally inaudible unless you place your ear to it. Having only 1.75 ears left I can safely say that I am a professional fan tester who should probably invest in a proper dB meter! The silence of this fan is owed mainly to the well-designed heatsinks and high efficiency.
The first stage inside a PSU is the transient filtering. This is where the unit filters the AC power coming from the mains so there is less noise which is extremely important as it impacts the efficiency and safety of the later stages, which is partly the reason you see people investing hundreds of pounds in UPS systems which do a similar job. To do this, a system of capacitors, ferrite coils and a metal oxide varistor is used. The quality of this stage is determined by the number of components doing the filtering. Many generic units will only have a singular capacitor or won’t have a metal oxide varistor (MOV). The filtering of this unit consists of an MOV, two coils, two X caps and four Y caps which is more than expected.
The unit itself is manufactured by Sirfa and the platform is very similar to that of high end PSUs from Thermaltake. The heatsinks are very well designed as they have a massive surface area, reducing the load on the fan.
The primary caps are Rubycon which are rated at 105 degrees, these are high quality caps that are very unlikely to leak or explode in the harshest of conditions.
The unit utilises DC-DC converters to split the 12V into 3.5V and 5V as required, this is the modern way of doing things!
This is the secondary heatsink, behind which there are many Nippon-Chemicon filtering caps for the hardwired cables. However it is worth noting that, for whatever reason, the modular connectors do not have any filtering caps.
Looking inside there gave me a headache, it’s very well packed together! The design is of good quality but is certainly not the best Sirfa has produced and it is evident that the odd corner has been cut to save money.
